Further: Beyond the Threshold Read Online Free PDF

complete fiction. In real life, they reportedly borrowed the name from the villain on a second-rate science fiction television program.
    Apophis was originally the Greek name of the Egyptian god Apep, the Destroyer, who dwelt in the eternal darkness of the underworld of the Duat, from which he came forth nightly in an attempt to destroy the sun. The asteroid, then, was classified Asteroid 99942 Apophis, or Asteroid Apophis, or just plain Apophis. Or, as it came to be known by the whole world a few short years later, the Destroyer.
    Did the scientists know what kind of sympathetic magic they were working when they named a chunk of rock 320 meters in diameter after a demon bent on devouring the sun? Massing out at 4.6 x 10^10 kg, or roughly eight times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza, when the Destroyer struck Earth on April 13, 2036, the impact released energy equivalent to 870 megatons (or 65,500 times the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima) as the asteroid struck Los Angeles at a velocity of 12.59 km/s.
    Those killed in the initial impact were the lucky ones. As debris from the Destroyer rained back down to Earth over a range of thousands of kilometers, the city of Los Angeles reduced to a crater filled with ash and shocked quartz, the sky was blackened over much of Earth. The asteroid had accomplished what its mythological namesake could not as darkness fell.
    The United States of America, unable to recover from the devastation, balkanized in the years following the Impact. The state of Utah withdrew from the union to become the independent nation of Deseret. Northern California, Oregon, and Washington became Pacifica and petitioned to join Canada. Florida became the Archdiocese of Florida, a Catholic Cuban state. The United States continued to exist as a sovereign state and political entity well into the next century, but its borders were much smaller, and it was no longer a player on the world stage. Worse, a sizeable percentage of Americans took the Impact as proof of the wrath of an angry god, punishment for a godless, secular nation. A flight of intellectuals and artists followed in the late 21C as the diminished USA became more and more repressively fundamentalist. Many of the dispossessed settled in New Zealand or Australia, India, or England—any developed nations with large English-speaking populations—my own paternal grandparents among them.
    In the rest of the world, the Impact was felt in different ways. Already in the late 20C and early 21C it was felt that Earth itself had turned against humankind somehow, lashing out more and more every year with earthquakes and floods and fires, but now even this fragile environment was no refuge against the dark. Following the Impact, humankind looked to space, not as an abstract source of wonder, something to be gazed at romantically or studied by lab-suited scientists in labs, but as a source of danger, as a looming threat.
    The first move was to establish a network of asteroid defense systems, sufficient to deflect any subsequent meteors or asteroids that might draw near Earth. Second, the nations of Earth began a concentrated and coordinated effort to mine the moon, the asteroids, and other celestial bodes of the solar system, to meet the growing energy demands of Earth, which would be long in recovering from the environmental and economic effects of the Impact.
    In time, with the consolidation of the United Nations, the chartering of the UNSA, and the gradual colonization of the asteroid belt, Mars, and the Jovian moons, space changed once more, becoming, for the first time, a possible new home for humankind. But still there lingered, in the back of every mind, the thought that, one day, the heavens might again open up and rain down destruction on Earth.

NINE

    Gazing up at the landscape curving overhead, I thought of Charlton Heston’s Taylor, standing before the ruined Statue of Liberty. The character, seeing the charred remains of a once proud culture,